Disable the Window Shadow on Screen Shots in Mac OS X

Have you ever noticed that there’s a shadow on every screen shot of a window you take in Mac OS X? If you don’t want those shadows to appear on your screen shots, you can disable the shadow effect by turning to defaults commands at the Terminal.

How to Turn Off Window Shadows on Screen Shots in Mac OS X

Launch the Terminal app and enter the following at the command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Hit return and then you’ll then need to restart SystemUIServer by killing it:

killall SystemUIServer

Again hit return.

Now take a screen capture of an individual window using Command+Shift+4 and the screen shot will not include the window shadow. Whether or not you like the effect is up to you.

Here’s what this looks like with a screenshot and no window shadow:

You can also shorten this command to disable screen shot shadows onto a single line, like so:

Do note this impacts all individual window screenshots taken on Mac OS X, whether the screenshot is copied to the clipboard like a Print Screen function, or whether the screenshot is saved to a file somewhere on the Mac.

Yes, this works in all versions of MacOS and Mac OS X, it does not matter what version is running on the Mac, from macOS Catalina, MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, all the way to Mac OS X Snow Leopard through Mavericks and Yosemite, those defaults strings can be used to toggle the window shadow effect on or off in screen shots.

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